Posted
by
msmash
on Thursday September 08, 2016 @02:25PM
from the affinity-for-renewable-energy dept.

Last year, Costa Rica powered itself using only renewable energy for 75 days. It has topped that feat this year. Vox reports: Costa Rica is pulling off a feat most countries just daydream about: For two straight months, the Central American country hasn't burned any fossil fuels to generate electricity. That's right: 100 percent renewable power. This isn't a blip, either. For 300 total days last year and 150 days so far this year, Costa Rica's electricity has come entirely from renewable sources, mostly hydropower and geothermal. Heavy rains have helped four big hydroelectric dams run above their usual capacity, letting the country turn off its diesel generators. Now, there's a huge, huge caveat here: Costa Rica hasn't eschewed all fossil fuels entirely. The country still has more than 1 million cars running on old-fashioned gasoline, which is why imported oil still supplies over half its total energy needs. The country also has cement plants that burn coal.

Also to note Electric Cars are a luxury for the Rich of Americans and Europeans. This isn't old fashioned yet, because there isn't a wide scale replacement.A flip phone is an old fashioned device, because most of the population have moved over to smartphones. However your iPhone 6 isn't an old fashion phone, just because the 7 just got released.There are still a lot of gasoline cars being created in the market, with many companies without an all electric plan for their cars in any time in the future.

An electric car is no more expensive than an ICE car in the long term - an ICE car's fuel and maintenance costs are vastly more expensive while an electric car is more expensive up front (and has the long-term occasional concentrated maintenance cost of a new battery pack). I know Gen. Y'ers who own Nissan Leafs and Kia Soul EVs.

An electric car is no more expensive than an ICE car in the long term - an ICE car's fuel and maintenance costs are vastly more expensive while an electric car is more expensive up front (and has the long-term occasional concentrated maintenance cost of a new battery pack). I know Gen. Y'ers who own Nissan Leafs and Kia Soul EVs.

I have a 20 year old acura integra with an old fashion ICE... Paid $16K in 1996 (perhaps $27K for something similar today). Only ICE related maintenance (other than changing oil about every 7500 miles and 3 air filter over those 20 years) was a battery and most recently spark plugs (when it diped down below 25mpg). At about 100K miles (mostly commute miles on par with a brave range-limited Leaf class EV), say about $12K in gas (@ $3/gallon) and about a $1000 in twenty oil changes (@ $50/each), and say $100

Lithium has a long history [metalary.com] of increasing in price. Unless we happen to find some huge, new, easy-to-mine vein of lithium ore, those prices most likely won't come down as production is barely keeping up with demand.

Yet lithium batteries have a long history of decreasing in price. I'd suspect that's because lithium batteries can be recycled and because the price of batteries has more to do with manufacturing costs than raw material price. Furthermore, lithium-based batteries might not always be the best - look at dual-carbon batteries for example.

Unless we happen to find some huge, new, easy-to-mine vein of lithium ore

Surely you are joking.The desert in California is full of the stuff in salt lakes and there is a huge salt lake in Bolivia with enough for centuries of current lithium usage in that lake alone. That Bolivian lake is so big and so flat that it is used by satellites to calibrate their altitude measurements. Access? It has around a dozen rusty locomotives parked on it. If they could get there then getting the salt out isn't so hard.Mi

An electric car is no more expensive than an ICE car in the long term - an ICE car's fuel and maintenance costs are vastly more expensive while an electric car is more expensive up front (and has the long-term occasional concentrated maintenance cost of a new battery pack).

I doubt it. The EV may be missing an engine, but it's hardly ever the engine that gives problems. Engines typically outlast most of the other crap that falls off cars. As an EV owner you'll still have the gearbox, the suspension, the brakes, the hydrualics, the electrical system, the aircon, the heater and most of the other mechanicals present in a non-EV car. With a single exception, my repairs for the last 25 years of driving have been electrical or non-engine mechanical problems.

Ohoho how I wish that were true! I've had to get two engines disassembled for major work in the last few months. One was rebuilt recently, but due to some microscopic imperfection in the reassembly process, it wrecked itself (spun a rod bearing) costing me thousands. And in my experience about 1/4 of automotive problems are directly related to the engine, and about 2/3rd related to the ICE or a system only an ICE would have. I've never had an engine fail from "abuse" though. In fact from what I've seen they

Don't be so pedantic, "hubris" comes from Ancient Greek, "hybris", therefore it is perfectly acceptable to write it with a y.

Perfectly acceptable and also unused outside of english lit major parties. But I guess if your goal is to pretend you are smarter than the other humans as opposed to being understood, you have succeeded. Really, ask yourself why you'd use a form of a word that essentially no one knows?

And how is hydroelectric renewable? Can they make it rain? I used 100% renewable money last month, I won the lottery!

Hydro is the most important of the renewables by far, but Greens only count it when they brag about the energy output of rainy countries. At other times, hydro is the energy source they loved to hate the most before nuclear came along.

Cement production doesn't involve power generation so no electricity is used. Worldwide Cement production uses around 20% of the world energy. You have to heat the mixture (a man made combination of several minerals) to about 2,700 degrees F to get Cement. This tremendous amount of heat (every ounce of mineral has to sustain this temp) requires massive expenditures of energy, sometimes electricity but usually something easy like thermal coal. The resulting klinker is then ball milled into a fine powder and sold as Portland Cement Concrete.

You have to heat the mixture (a man made combination of several minerals) to about 2,700 degrees F to get Cement.

hey wait, don't they have volcanoes in Costa Rica? So that pesky cement production problem is solvable.
Now to just get everybody switched over to electric cars.

And since someone inevitably brought up the energy storage with problem with renewables -- Costa Rica is also pretty close to the equator. Just run mass up the space elevator when the wind is blowing / Sun is shining. Then run mass down the elevator when you need more baseload power. Good grief, I can't believe I have to spell everything out for

"The downside to hydropower is that it requires consistent rainfall. Though the dams in Costa Rica are now full, just months ago the country was suffering one of the worst droughts in its history. This forced Costa Rican utility companies to burn fuel to generate power, releasing greenhouse gases and causing rate rises. Even if Costa Rica were able to sustain 100% clean electricity production, the country still relies on petroleum for transportation, and emissions from this sector are the largest hurdle the country faces in reaching its carbon neutrality goal. The environment ministry reports that fuel burned by cars, buses and trains accounted for almost 70% of the country’s carbon emissions in 2014. According to customs there are only 200 or so hybrid cars in Costa Rica to take advantage of the energy produced by renewables on the grid.

The fact that even a country like Costa Rica, which has made major investments to produce clean energy, still struggles with these obstacles, shows just how difficult it would be for larger, more industrialised nations to follow in its footsteps.

With a population under 5 million and no major industry, Costa Rica uses much less power than most developed countries, and its geography of tightly packed volcanoes, rivers and mountains is more suited to producing clean power than most."

Solar is great but it is not a base load. Without a massive, MASSIVE, bank of batteries solar has no effective buffering - it generates full power when the sun is out, less when cloudy, and nothing at night and so cannot be depended on as a single source of power. Likewise for wind.

They are best served supplementing renewable base loads such as hydro, so when there is plenty of sunlight/wind the hydro use, and thus depletion of the water level, is reduced.

Base load is a chicken/egg issue. Because we had a lot of thermal power generation that runs best 24/7/365 we've spent years providing incentives for energy use at night despite most industrial and commercial activity happening in daylight.

If you've got an Aluminium smelter or 24/7 production lines then a lot of base load is ideal, but in a lot of places it does not really matter apart from a little bit needed for lighting and residential use at night.

Along with lots and lots of primarily lead acid batteries for storage.You want to know where a good proportion of that lead ends up when batteries reach end of life?You want to know what lead does to the environment? The Wildlife? The People?

"The plant consists of five big industrial windmills and two lakes. On windy days — and there are plenty — the windmills harness the Canary Islands' Atlantic gusts. When production exceeds demand, such as at night, excess energy is used to pump water from a sea-level lake up into a natural volcanic crater half a mile uphill. When the wind dies down, the water is released down through a pipe connecting the two lakes. On its way, it passes through turbines, which generate hydro-power. Everything is connected with sensors so that within five seconds of the wind dying down, the hydro portion of the plant kicks in. For island residents, the lights don't even flicker."

That depends on what is meant by "consistent". Hydro power that harness waterfalls won't stop producing electricity unless the river dries up. For most rivers, that is just not going to happen, even if there's a drought. Especially not rivers that get some of their water from glacier melt-offs.At worst, you will produce less electricity in dry years than in wet ones, but it doesn't require consistent rainfall - inconsistent works fine.

For years, decades even, people have been saying that you can't run an economy on renewable* sources of electricity but Costa Rica is showing that it can be done. Some countries in Europe have a high percentage of the electrical generation from renewable sources at times but nothing close to 100% for 76 days.

Sure they are using fossil fuels for transportation and other uses but they are way ahead of other countries. When Canada, the US, Australia, or even some other country like New Zealand powers their e

When fossil fuels start to run out the price increases. As the price increases alternative energy sources become viable and evil corporations looking to make a profit start to invest in developing them.

The current model (capitalism) has already solved the problem, therefore.

In the UK, onshore wind is already significantly cheaper than nuclear. The proposed Hinkley Point C plant will be paid about 30% more than onshore wind for every watt it produces, and that's not even counting the other massive subsidies it will attract.

Fossil fuels are profitable only because we've collectively decided that they should be profitable, not due to the invisible hand of the market.

Oh really? We just "decided" they were profitable. Imagine if we just "decided" they weren't profitable tomorrow, what would happen then? I'll tell you. A lot of children would not get to school because they could not ride a bus. A lot of people would die of seemingly minor injuries because we could not drive an ambulance to them and/or the medicines we produce, transport, refrigerate, and sterilize with fossil fuels would disappear. No more airplanes for travel and communication. No more container s

My rough guess as to why a country like Costa Rica is having better success at this than we in the U.S. are is simply due to a much smaller population, and therefore considerably fewer superinfluential sociopaths trying to cockblock anything that looks like Human progress.

We know how to build wind farms. - Think of the birds!
We know how to build hydro-electric stations. - Think of the fish!
We know how to build geo-thermal stations. - Think of the fish!
We know how to build solar stations. - Think of the birds!
Each form of renewable energy comes with it's own impact to the environment. As long as that's the case and any environmentalist with a microphone can shut down progress, the US will never be able to cut ties with fossil fuels. The one big advantage fossil fuels have

As I recall the solar PV panels have a color and/or reflective properties that are not seen in nature. The birds are confused by the panels and run into them in flight, which injures and kills them.

One theory is that they are confusing them with water, and instead of a pleasant "plop" into a puddle they have a hard landing and break their little legs. Another theory is that the dark flat color looks like a hole or cave to them, so instead of flying into shade they fly into a hard surface. Another theory

In the UK we are looking to build tidal lagoon power stations. Environmental groups support it because while there will be some change and damage, it's way better than the alternatives (coal, fracked gas or nuclear).

The opposition comes from anti-environmentalists, mostly gas and coal shills.

When they trot out these "feel good" stories about renewable energy, that this is a developing nation with an extremely temperate climate. Also remember this is the model for the United States and the rest of the modern first-world/western nations under globalism/leftism: reducing them to third-world status.

The guy sort of has a point. A lot of people in Costa Rica don't have a connection to the grid, so they have to run their own generators for electricity. That's not counted in the 100% renewable figures.

Portability doesn't give fossil fuels any advantage in remote areas, it gives them an advantage on vehicles that have to travel long distances before refuelling. Don't forget that fossil fuels require heavy industry to produce, so unless you have crude oil pumps and a refinery on site it needs to be shipped in, from a long distance since it's a remote area. In remote areas on-site energy production is an advantage. The arctic and antarctic regions get a solid 6 months of sun per year and don't seem to have

Even in non-arctic conditions, mining companies and the like apparently fancy hybrid solar-diesel gensets these days. Saves a lot of fuel, and lot of the hassle with its transportation into remote places.

Why do you think they use oil from other countries? in 2015 they imported as much as they produced. Half of what they product ended up being exported.So their consumption is 2/3 from imports and only 1/3 of their own oil.

Sure, why use our own reserves (which are around 260-270 years worth of oil, at our current consumption rate) when we can use everyone else's - and then end up with the big reserves to be sold at much higher prices in the future? When you have an abundance of a resource, and your neighbors (Canada and Mexico, where we get a lot of our oil) are selling theirs without concern - why not buy from them? When they run out - you're in the driver's seat...

I think Iceland generates almost all of it's power from geothermal, to the point where most of the world's bauxite smelting is done there, and there's enough power left over for most citizens to pay a flat rate for electricity.

How long can you country survive with 100% renewal electricity? I bet less than a week.100% renewable electricity is a remarkable step. Electric cars will allow to reduce fossil fuels even further from that point.

Mine.... probably quite a while.New Zealand is 80 - 90% renewable. If the aluminium smelter was shut down, that would probably tip the scale, seeing as how it consumes 15% of our electricity production.

In our trip to the country, we stayed in a semi-permanent camp on the Pacific shore, which was not wired. In fact, there was no proper road to it either — the only way to get there was by (small) plane.

The camp had a generator, of course — a noisy affair, which they fired for a few hours each day to power up/recharge the radio and phones. But, hey, there are still places in the world, where even those evil devices — made from poisonous materials by exploited workers toiling in polluting factories — aren't known...

Some times the spurning of civilization is explained simply by absence of civilization...

Great that they can exist on renewables like this, mean it. But using an essentially non-industrial country in a temperate climate as an example is statistical bias at best, outright lying at worse.
How many aluminum smelters, steel plants, large data centers, and other myriad large bulk power users exist in Costa Rica? You know, the things that allow humans to actually build a first world country capable of supporting a large urban population?
Yeah, thought so.

I don't think Costa Rica is interested in invading another country nor has it been invaded except by folks enjoying its beaches and mild climate. Not sure how big the police force is but may be no larger than that of a big US city.

Unfortunately, in the US, we're past peak Hydro here due to environmental impacts and the corresponding legislation. Additionally, Costa Rica had to stop hydro generation because of water shortages..

Geothermal has some applications, but they've geographically limited. Costa Rica's got it fairly good. But the US doesn't really have the same distribution of available sites that are useful for utility-grade geothermal.

Now, that's not to say other forms of geothermal might not help out on smaller scales. Bu

Costa Rica's per capita GDP is 1/3 of that of the US, making it a fairly poor country. And if you want to find other countries that use little fossil fuel energy, just keep going down the list and look at the countries that are even poorer than Costa Rica.

Every country in the world was run on pretty much 100% renewable energy sources until the industrial revolution. That's neither something to brag about or something to aspire to.

It is common for rural areas to be disconnected form the grid and many small communities in Central/South America run off generators. I stayed at a surf/yoga camp in 2011 that was run off candles and generators, even though a place to tie into the grid was only a couple miles away.

When I ruminated about how a candle is probably a worse polluter than a 60W light bulb powered by a coal power plant, the crunchy ex-pat owner got pretty upset with me. I goolged it when we got home and sure enough, candles horrible for air pollution compared to light bulbs.

My country (Paraguay) went 100% renewable after 1973, when the Acaray dam went operational and covered 100% of the energy needs of the country. In 1983 the world's largest operational dam (Itaipú) began to serve energy and we own 50% of it (with Brazil). We also own 50% of another large dam (Yacyreta). Now, and save for biomass-burning usines used in the Mennonite colonies at the far north, isolated Chaco area, we still are 100% covered by hydropower. There are plans to convert these biomass plants either to solar power or to lay down wires so they could use power from Itaipu. So, I would say that covering large energy needs with renewable power is totally possible, and we are proof of it since 1973.

"The downside to hydropower is that it requires consistent rainfall. Though the dams in Costa Rica are now full, just months ago the country was suffering one of the worst droughts in its history. This forced Costa Rican utility companies to burn fuel to generate power, releasing greenhouse gases and causing rate rises."

Hydro is claimed in renewable counts when making claims about performance. But when making claims about progress, its almost always credited to wind and solar expansion. Here we have very high perentage of electricity considered renewable, but almost none of that is wind or solar. So some will downplay the headline for that reason.

In reality, hydro is great for those countries that have the option, but its not a production growth capable technology as it gets harder and harder to get approvals to seques

Either your are a nitpicker or don't understand the issue. On a human time frame oil and gas are not renewable. That's why when having a sane discussion, we separate renewable sources (wind/solar/hydro/...) and non-renewable sources (oil, gas, coal, nuclear fission,...).Technically, I agree hydro isn't renewable either if you empty a reservoir that took 20 years to fill in one month. But it is clearly renewable if you keep the reservoir at a more or less constant level every year (after a cycle of all seas

That's not how this world works. The rest of the world wants the tech and industry products. Takes energy to make those, and even in Costa Rica half the energy used comes from fossil despite misleading headline